Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would block U.S. Steel’s planned sale to a Japanese company, the first time the GOP presidential candidate has weighed in on the controversial acquisition announced late last year.
“I would block it instantaneously. Absolutely,” Trump said after a meeting with the president of the Teamsters labor union, which represents workers in the transportation industry. “We saved the steel industry. Now, U.S. Steel is being bought by Japan. So terrible.”
The brief remarks are Trump’s first comments on Nippon Steel’s $15 billion deal to purchase the iconic American company. His 2024 presidential campaign declined requests to comment on the sale when it was first announced in December, despite his aggressive protectionist policies aimed at the steel industry and other manufacturing sectors when he was president. But Trump made clear Wednesday that, if re-elected, he intends to take even more extreme measures to limit trade as he attempted to appeal to the Teamsters’ 1.3 million members.
“We want to bring jobs back to the country, and sometimes tariffs can do that,” Trump said in a speech in Washington, D.C., adding that “we started that process” during his first term, “and we will finish it up” if he is reelected.
Trump declined to explain exactly how he might block the U.S. steel sale if he returns to the White House. But other critics of the sale in both parties have called on the Biden administration to use all the powers at its disposal to keep the deal from going through, arguing it will hurt unionized workers.
President Biden’s economic team has indicated it will give the acquisition “serious scrutiny” as part of a review overseen by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S., which probes deals involving foreign entities.
Trump was also vague Wednesday on his plans for a new wave of tariffs on imports from foreign trading partners. In his first term, Trump levied tariffs on more than $360 billion worth of imports from China — policies Biden has largely kept in place.
In recent months, the former president has expressed support for raising tariffs even further, by repealing normal trade relations with Beijing, which could increase tariffs on Chinese goods to as much as 40 percent. And Trump advisers are reportedly considering plans to go even further — pushing tariffs on Chinese imports as high as 60 percent, while setting a 10 percent tariff for all other imports.
Asked about those reports after his Teamsters meeting, Trump was evasive.
“We’re going to see what happens,” he said. “What I want to do is bring back manufacturing into our country. I want to make the cars sold by China here, in the United States, and I think we’ll do that.”